Why Obvious Child Will Make Judd Apatow Jealous

When people talk about the funny, lady-centric comedy, they usually mention Bridesmaids. But Obvious Child, which was directed by a woman and features funny, flailing, and fully realized female characters, is leading a pack of movies (and TV shows) made for us and—by us. It's also wicked funny.

As Jennifer Arellano noted earlier this week in her interview with the actress Jenny Slate on ELLE.com, the movie Obvious Child is not really a film about abortion, even though that's how it's being billed. I'd go further and say that the few parts of the movie that directly deal with abortion (Slate's character, Donna, decides to terminate her pregnancy after a one-night stand) are the weakest ones in a mostly excellent movie. In particular, there's a clunky scene where Slate and her two best friends are talking about abortion and one of them makes a speech about our "patriarchal society" that seems like it was lifted from a 19-year-old's social justice Tumblr.

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What feels funniest and freshest about the movie is the totally comfortable way that Donna and her friends talk about (and live in) their bodies, and the way the women in the film relate to each other. (An early scene in Bridesmaids in which Maya Rudolph and Kristen Wiig joke about penises has an inkling of this kind of realism, but Obvious Child makes it less slap-sticky.) Donna is a stand-up comic and the movie opens with her talking about how by the end of the day, every woman's underwear is filled with discharge, which no one ever talks about. "Whatever," she says to the audience, unfazed by her own public admission, "I have a human vagina." Donna and her roommate, Nellie, played by the always-appreciated Gaby Hoffmann, are comfortable with each other in a way that is so recognizable and naturalistic: Nellie comes home and strokes Donna's hair after she's dumped; Donna takes her pregnancy test in front of Nellie and then Nellie pees in front of Donna.

The body comfort, in fact, is over-arching. After Donna has a drunken meet-cute with her one-night-stand, Max, they pee in front of each other and Max accidentally farts, which she thinks is hilarious. This is a welcome departure from the body discomfort of a show like Sex and the City, where Carrie was insanely, annoyingly nervous about farting in front of Big, and Miranda makes a huge deal out of a boyfriend going to the bathroom with the door open. Furthermore, the way Donna and Nellie are styled—or unstyled—feels fully realistic. Donna wears the same unfussy nude bra in several scenes. The two try on cheap vintage clothes and Donna makes a joke about how a shirt she's trying on smells like "an old whore's b.o." They wear little makeup and throw their hair up in messy buns, and not the kinds of buns that look perfectly tousled, but the kind that you throw your hair up in when you wake up in the morning and haven't even looked in the mirror yet.

Part of the reason we're seeing better, more realistic portrayals of young women on screen is because young women are actually the ones making these movies and shows. Proof: Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson are the co-creators of Broad City, a series Amy Poehler executive produces; Amy Schumer stars in, writes, and produces Inside Amy Schumer; Lena Dunham directs, produces, writes, and kills on screen in Girls. Issa Rae, creator and star of The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl YouTube series, is currently developing a show for HBO; Liz Meriwether is the girl behind New Girl. The list, thankfully, could go on. Only a woman, like Obvious Child director Gillian Robespierre, would know the way your underwear looks every evening, and know the secret shame you probably have about it.

While it's wonderful to see this small flowering of female-helmed projects among the plague of male-driven superhero movies, there's one drawback: the straight men tend to be one-dimensional. In Obvious Child, Max is so over-the-top nice to Donna, even as she's not so nice to him, it borders on unbelievable. Not to mention that his character is paper thin: We know he's from a small town in Vermont and that's supposed to tell us that he's wholesome and sweet, the human equivalent of maple syrup. In a way, it makes me more sympathetic to someone like Judd Apatow, who has been bashed for creating flimsy female characters. Clearly it's really hard to write dimensional characters of the opposite sex.

All that said, it's such a delight to see a movie about frank, funny women succeed at telling a deeply felt story. And any movie that can land a joke about HPV—in a drunken voicemail to her ex, Slate accuses his new girlfriend of having HPV, the bad kind, not like her "normal kind of HPV that 1-in-4 nice women have"—is a movie that is worth shelling out for in the theater.